How liars deal with a challenge

Rachel Maddow telling the truth to Bill O’Reilly … gee she’s good at this stuff!

Whaaat? Meeting abuse meeting your facts with more facts? (click)

Spot the pattern:

Rather than contribute to a debate about ‘the facts’ Maddow asserted about him and Fox News, (e.g. ‘This is why what she’s saying is wrong…’) Bill O’Reilly merely whacked Maddow’s sincerity (‘you have to be kidding’) and mental alertness (‘Unbelievable. Do you even live in this country?’) and then trumpets the relative ratings of their networks (Fox ‘kicks your network’s butt every night, madam’).

In other words, a smoke screen. (A classic example of a bully’s crap argument style.)

That’s pretty much how liars deal with someone challenging them:
(1) Ignore the facts or assertions of facts
(2) Abuse and smear your critics as somehow mentally deficient or ‘envious’ of your ‘achievements’
(3) Go on working your con-game and feeding your lies to anyone who will listen … until you are finally exposed by inconvenient truth (like Bernard Madoff?) and STOPPED IN YOUR TRACKS.

Then, when you’re out of jail again, move on.
Find another niche (maybe in another country?) Rinse and repeat.

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Shep Smith (the exception that proves the rule) at Fox called it like this on the original disgraceful Shirley Sherrod smear story:

“We here at Studio B did not run the video and did not reference the story in any way for many reasons, among them: we didn’t know who shot it, we didn’t know when it was shot, we didn’t know the context of the statement, and because of the history of the videos on the site where it was posted, in short we do not and did not trust the source.”

[…] As expected, some people copping such criticism won’t (can’t?) answer the facts or address their track record, … That’s pretty much how liars deal with someone challenging them: (1) Ignore the facts or assertions of facts (2) Abuse and smear your critics as somehow mentally deficient or ‘envious’ of your ‘achievements’ (3) Go on working your con-game and feeding your lies to anyone who will listen … until you are finally exposed by inconvenient truth (like Bernard Madoff?) and STOPPED IN YOUR TRACKS. […]

Another round between O’Reilly and Maddow. He pours some more scorn and insults on her. She shows him up again…

“Remember, Mr. O’Reilly says there is not a shred of evidence that Fox News hypes stories about scary black people taking white people’s stuff,” she said.

“I am not interested in playing cable news insult ping-pong with Mr. O’Reilly, but as much as he keeps insisting that I’m no one worth arguing with, that I’m an ‘uber-leftist’ — he called me that in his column — and a loon twice now, and a slightly larger percentage of 1% of the population watches his show than the proportion of 1% of the population that watches my show, for all he complains about how unimportant I am, my criticism that Fox News scares white people on purpose to politically benefit conservatives — damn the consequences for the country — that criticism appears to have struck a nerve over at Fox. It appears to have gotten under Mr. O’Reilly’s skin,” she concluded. “Good.”